Vote up?

I started web designing around 4 years ago and when I started everything went through the photoshop stage of mocking up my designs. It was a slow and sometimes frustrating process.

Now however I no longer just use photoshop. I use a photoshop and illustrator mix. Illustrator allows much more control over type and over image quality so I use that to layout the page and import items from photoshop if I need photos editing or if there is something I can’t do in illustrator.

I find that most clients want 2-3 initial ideas to start with and this means that coding straight into the browser is not an option as this would waste far too valuable time for me and the company i work for, to then just chuck two pages of code and css away at the end of the design process.

However if I had a client with a specific specification and clear goals of what they want to achieve then coding straight into the browser is definately the way forward.